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Architecture & Design

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

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Process & Practices

In-App Subscriptions Made Easy

There are various types of subscriptions: recurring, non-recurring, free-trial periods, various billing cycles and any possible billing variation one can imagine. But with lack of information online, you might discover that mobile subscriptions behave differently from what you expected. This article will make your life somewhat easier when addressing an in-app subscriptions implementation.

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Operations & Infrastructure

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

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Enterprise Architecture

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

Big news for Ruby web frameworks: Merb and Rails will be merged in Rails 3.0. The merge will bring some of Merb's characteristics to Rails: a defined public API, ability to run a barebones version rails-core (like merb-core) with further functionality available in the form of plugins, performance improvements and more.

In this interview from RubyFringe, Yehuda Katz talks about the design principles behind Merb and its focus on a stable API. Yehuda also mentions Yard, an RDoc replacement, which provides a simple way to define contracts for Ruby methods.

NewRelic announced a cooperation with the Rails Core team to improve Rails performance. An opt-in feature allows to make performance data available to the Rails Core team, which can use it to figure out Rails bottlenecks in real world Rails apps. Also: FiveRuns' TuneUp performance monitoring tools now supports Merb.

The Rails plugin ExceptionNotifier made Exception monitoring easy. Two companies (Exceptional and Hoptoad) extend this by providing a third party service that intercept exceptions and track them in a web interface. We talked to Eoghan McCabe from Exceptional and Matt Jankowski from Hoptoad.

New Relic announced that 37signals uses their Ruby on Rails performance management solution to find problematic areas in their applications. David Heinemeier Hansson confirmed that they achieved a 50% speedup in certain actions.

In this presentation from QCon SF 2007, Justin Gehtland explains two open solutions to distributed identity and their Rails integration components: the OpenID system (using ruby-openid) and CAS (using rubycas-client).

A new project for infectious disease reporting and management system, implemented by CSI and the state of Utah, is built using JRuby on Rails (among other technologies). We talked to Mike Herrick, of the project, to find out how well JRuby on Rails fared and why it was chosen for the project.

New Relic introduces a new performance analysis tool for Rails applications. The tool is installable as a Rails plugin, and offloads the analysis to the New Relic service. We talked to New Relic's Lew Cirne about the technology behind the product.

Rails 2.0's REST support is useful but it could be less verbose and more helpful when it comes to nested resources. A Rails plugin called resource_controller helps out by taking the tedious work out of REST controllers. We take a look at the problem and how resource_controller can be used to fix it.

Rails has gained popularity for its clean implementation of MVC and slick APIs. But what happens when your Rails app grows up, gets popular but can't keep up with requests? This presentation by James Cox will get you started with optimizing web applications by giving practical tips and pointing out common bottlenecks.

Rails 2.0 is out - but some of the standard books and tutorials haven't been updated to this version yet. Trying to learn about Rails with a Rails 1.2 book or tutorial, but running Rails 2.0 is bound to cause some frustration. We look at the best approach to tackle this.

The MOle, so named because it acts as the investigators agent, is a plugin that provides insight into the inner workings of Ruby on Rails in realtime, as requests come in and get processed. The author describes how the plugin came about and gives InfoQ readers a detailed introduction to his innovative plugin.

Just over a week's gone by and the community is still buzzing with the Rails scalability debate. Developers are asking the defining question: does Web 2.0 darling Twitter.com prove Rails can't scale? James Cox gives InfoQ readers a comprehensive summary.